THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 63
(once the yews had grown in), as mark-
ing the beginning of the current maze
boom. During the first half of the twen-
tieth century, mazes had again been in
decline. But, starting in the nineteen-
sixties, they found new champions in
the arts and literature. Jorge Luis Borg-
es’s labyrinthine short story “The Gar-
den of Forking Paths” found an Anglo-
phone readership in 1962; in 1967, the
British sculptor Michael Ayrton, known
for his chunky Minotaur statues, pub-
lished a fictional biography of the orig-
inal maze-maker, Daedalus. W. H. Mat-
thews’s long-out-of-print history was
reissued, and, in 1973, Atari débuted the
first screen-based maze, “Gotcha.” In
the New York Times, the popular math-
ematician Martin Gardner wondered
where the “sudden hankering for mazes”
came from: “Is it because millions feel
trapped in various kinds of labyrinths—
religious, moral, economic, political?”
Finding a way out of a puzzle maze
might, he supposed, somehow help re-
lieve that larger, existential anxiety.
Longleat’s layout has been adjusted
a number of times, including by Fisher,
but its original creator was a mysteri-
ous figure named Greg Bright. In 1971,
after attending the second Glastonbury
Festival, Bright, a nineteen-year-old
high-school dropout, stayed on at the
farm where the festival is hosted and
spent a year digging a maze in a field
that was too damp to graze cows. A
dozen or so miles away, at Longleat, the
heir to the estate, Alexander Thynn,
heard about Bright’s serpentine exca-
vations. After climbing a ladder to view
the results from above, he commissioned
Bright to add a hedge maze to Long-
leat’s revenue-generating attractions.
Bright’s design was deliberately fiend-
ish. Even today, the paths are narrow
and whirlpool-like, frequently sending
visitors around in spiralling loops and
depositing them at one node or another
again and again, until they pick the route
that releases them into the next part of
the maze. Bright wanted to incorporate
tunnels, to increase the complexity, but
budgetary constraints forced him to set-
tle for covered bridges. A sign at the
mouth of the maze warns that it takes
an average of forty-five minutes to com-
plete, though “some never make it to
the tower in the middle.”
“It’s too clever by half,” Fisher told
me. “It’s very angry, very hostile.” It
wasn’t long before Longleat started
getting complaints from guests whose
visits had extended well past the point
of amusement. The staff installed clue
stations: directional arrows each cov-
ered by small metal panels labelled
“Lift if Lost.” Eventually, Longleat
turned to Fisher for advice on how to
make the experience more enjoyable.
By then, Bright had made himself un-
available. Having arguably triggered a
global maze renaissance, he had turned
his attention to paper mazes, creating
increasingly confusing designs that he
accompanied with comments like
“Solving the mazes is of little signifi-
cance” and “I do not expect you to do
this one.” He turned down lucrative
maze commissions, including one from
Disney. Then, in 1979, he disappeared,never to build or publish a maze again.
Fisher tempered Bright’s fierceness,
uncovering the bridges, so that visitors
could orient themselves and spot miss-
ing friends, and slicing a corridor through
one edge of the maze, so that success-
ful aspirants could exit directly from the
center, without having to plunge back
in and navigate the whole thing in re-
verse. Some might appreciate the met-
aphor of an unavoidable descent from
a moment of triumph back into life’s
labyrinthine struggles, but not Fisher.
“Where in a film should you have the
final chariot race, the most exciting car
chase, the most romantic love scene?”
he said. “Right before the credits.”
Since Fisher’s interventions, Long-
leat has been altered again: the bridges
have been removed altogether, creating
a handful of incongruously spaciousAt Escot, a series of gates allows groundskeepers direct access to the maze’s interior.